Call for Submissions - Children of Mental Illness Book Project

Many of our members in the NYC Autobiography and Memoir Writing Group are survivors of traumas. Many of our members specifically were children of parents or siblings who suffered from mental illness.

Growing up in a context of mental illness - particularly when it is unregulated - is one of the most distressing and confusing of situations. It sometimes results in being sexually or physically abused; certainly it is rare to escape the mentally ill home without significant verbal and psychological abuse. Sometimes it leads us to develop our own neuroses and fear beginning our own families, fear entering romantic relationships, and fear ever becoming close to anyone.

This is a book that is intended to be an anthology of writings by people whose parents, siblings, or other significant family-member suffered from mental illness.

This is a brief meeting where we will talk about the scope of this book project and start thinking about relevant topics to address.

Potential due date for submissions for this book will be March 1, 2013 (that is when another project of mine should be wrapping up).

Suggested word length will be from 1000 to 3000 words per entry.

We seek about 50 entries for this book. We may pursue a Kickstarter for this project and thereby provide small honorariums for the authors.

If you are interested, please attend this meeting. It will be short.

We will have cookies and fruit and coffee and tea. Stay afterwards if you are interested in joining our weekly Guided Autobiography class, the first session of which is directly following at 1pm.

Attendance is NOT required to participate, so if you can't make it, no worries.